The Bridge

Crispin Burke

Sun-Tzu, Clausewitz, and Thucydides: It’s Only a Lot of Reading If You Do It

Sun-Tzu, Clausewitz, and Thucydides: It’s Only a Lot of Reading If You Do It

What’s a budding young strategist to do? By all means, read the classics. Read them in full, cover-to-cover…or at least the portions written by the original authors. (I skip the hundreds of pages of forewords and afterwards.) Next thing you know, you’ll be far more adept at recognizing the obligatory gratuitous Clausewitz quote. It won’t be long before you find yourself groaning at the inevitable article which begins by invoking politics by other means.